In Danish, the distribution of stød exhibits a pattern related to the position of the stressed syllable. Some phonological theories of stød, e.g. Basbøll (2005), consider stød on the antepenultimate or ultimate syllable, and non-stød on the penultimate syllable, to be the default. This article reports on a production study with nonce words, investigating the distributional pattern of stød in relation to the position of the stressed syllable in monomorphemic nonce words. Ten speakers were asked to pronounce 336 nonce words with stress on either the ultimate, penultimate, or antepenultimate syllable. The results showed that stød on ultimate stressed syllables and non-stød on penultimate stressed syllables replicates in nonce words, but stød on antepenultimate stressed syllables does not. This suggests that stød in antepenultimate stressed words is not the default, but lexical.

In this squib, I provide arguments in favour of the view that Danish rundt is a postposition. The functional, semantic, and syntactic properties of adpositions are discussed, and I show that competing analyses of rundt are falsifiable while the postposition analysis itself is not falsified.

This corpus study compares the use of Danish prepositions in the writing of L1 users of Danish to that of L2 users of Danish (with English as their L1). It examines to what extent non-standard usage is a specific L2 phenomenon and to what degree the challenges with prepositions are shared between the L1 and L2 group. We analyze the distribution and characteristics of non-standard usage involving four frequent Danish prepositions: til ‘to’, i ‘in’, på ‘on’, and for ‘for’. The results show that L2 texts are characterized by a larger share of non-standard tokens and by confusion of prepositions and non-prepositions. Yet, both L1 texts and L2 texts have non-standard usage and both have possible English calques. Based on the similarities between the two groups, we recommend that future studies include naturally occurring L1 production as a baseline for describing characteristics of L2 production.

Despite many attempts, we do not yet know how to answer the question exhaustively and adequately: What is common Danish stød phonetically? Specifically, is there an underlying physiological constancy behind the considerable acoustic variability? And is there a common denominator to the different acoustic manifestations that might explain their perceptual equivalence? Systematic acoustic, physiological, and perceptual investigations of common Danish stød now span (a little more than) three quarters of a century. This is a review of that research, to determine what may be considered established phonetic facts about common Danish stød and the open questions that remain for future research.

This article gives an overview of the use of non-local passives in mainland Scandinavian, i.e. passives where the subject of the first verb is a thematic argument of a second verb. Three factors are important: whether V1 is a control verb or a raising passive, whether V2 is a passive participle or an infinitive and whether the passive is morphological or periphrastic. Danish and Norwegian allow passive control verbs such as forsøge ‘try’ with passive participles whereas this pattern is only found with semi-control verbs like begära ‘request’ in Swedish. In Swedish there is an alternative strategy for strict control verbs, viz. active control verb plus passive infinitive. All three languages allow both passive infinitival complements and passive participles with raising passives such as påstås ‘is claimed’. These passive constructions need to be distinguished from so called long passives and double passives where a passive feature on either V1 or V2 can spread to the adjacent verb.

The last three decades have witnessed increasing interest in discourse-pragmatic markers (DPMs), both with regards to their high frequency in spoken discourse and their multifunctionality in interaction. Most studies have centered on English, with studies on Danish restricted to a handful of previous interactional discourse analyses. This paper is a preliminary investigation of the Danish word sådan (commonly glossed as ‘such’ or ‘like this/that’). A qualitative, form-based, discourse analytic approach is undertaken on over 40 minutes of naturally occurring Danish talk to argue that sådan qualifies as a DPM. In service of textual, subjective, and intersubjective macro-functions, sådan illustrates; exemplifies; marks hesitation; approximates a quantity; mitigates, hedges, or softens; and allows self-correction or self-repair. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for sådan’s place in the Danish DPM system and our understanding of DPMs across languages.

Sounds spoken on the inbreath have been shown to be common in the world’s languages, and in the Nordic languages ingressive speech seems to be especially frequent. The present study focuses on Finnish and Danish response particles spoken on the inbreath, by examining their uses in everyday talk-in-interaction in corpora of recorded interactions. The particles we examine and their non-ingressive counterparts can perform confirming and acknowledging actions. We analyze the particles as receipts to answers to questions, as responses to questions, as responses to assessments, and as responses to affiliation-seeking utterances. In these positions, the ingressive particles turn out to index that the content of the previous turn was already sufficiently established and, consequently, that there is nothing to add. In cases where an engaged response is called for, the particles are shown to have a disaffiliative potential.

It has been reported that speakers of Danish understand more Swedish than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than vice versa. We hypothesise that literate speakers of Danish use their orthographic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. To test this hypothesis, first-language (L1) Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited to study the online brain responses during decoding operations. Results showed that ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was inconsistent with the Danish spelling were significantly more negative-going than ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was consistent with the Danish spelling between 750 ms and 900 ms after stimulus onset. Together with higher word-recognition scores for consistent items, our data provide strong evidence that online activation of L1 orthography enhances word recognition of spoken Swedish in literate speakers of Danish.

Are some languages universally seen as beautiful? And if so, what are the linguistic traits that make some languages sound more pleasing than others? This paper addresses these two questions. We do so with results from two listener experiments that use speech samples from a bilingual Danish–Swedish speaker in a matched guise test, where the listeners are ‘previously unexposed’ students from central China. Our results indicate that listeners from Central China with no previous exposure find Swedish more pleasing sounding than Danish. This finding provides evidence that there could be features of language that sound more beautiful to listeners cross-culturally. In a follow-up experiment we remove the intonation contours of the speech to see whether this prosodic trait plays a role for evaluations. The results show that the difference in evaluations between Swedish and Danish disappears when both speech samples are monotonised. We discuss the importance of our findings for language attitudes research.

In recent years stød has appeared in words where the current phonological and morphological principles of its distribution would exclude it. Thus, a disyllable like [ˈsiːðə] side ‘page’ is without stød, also in a compound like bagside ‘back page’, but it has lately been heard with stød: . In a controlled experiment, speakers were required to produce compounds consisting of an existing initial word succeeded by a final nonce noun. The results indicate that stød may be spreading in this context. Furthermore, its distribution across the 40 nonce nouns was found to be similar to its distribution among existing nouns in the vocabulary: There are more nonce nouns with stød (i) in the definite singular, (ii) especially with short stressed vowels, and (iii) particularly if the initial word is monosyllabic. A change is apparently underway which will eventually partially suspend a non-stød principle which relieves disyllabic lexemes of stød.

Through in-depth analysis of the use of det ‘it, that’ and så ‘then’ occupying the first clausal position (the prefield) in Danish talk-in-interaction, this paper investigates how speakers use highly flexible linguistic elements to their advantage when commencing clauses in real time. These particular words are useful when occupying the prefield, because their flexible nature means that they can be used even when speakers do not have a full format ready for the carrier clause, as long as they have some idea of the interactional purpose of the clause and its information structural prerequisites. The dominating frequency of the most frequent clause openers goes largely unmentioned in previous accounts of the prefield, and the use of det ‘it, that’ and så ‘then’ challenges the popular notion that the textually unmarked prefield is also the grammatical subject of the carrier clause.

In the double object construction (e.g. the man gave the woman some flowers) a preference has been observed for placing definite arguments before indefinite arguments when both appear post-verbally. In Danish it has been reported that examples with the indefinite–definite order are read more slowly than those with the definite–indefinite order in speeded acceptability judgement tasks, and they are less frequent in corpus texts. This short communication presents a memory recall experiment showing that the preference observed in comprehension and written production is also observed in on-line oral production. Participants produce definite–indefinite orders when attempting to recall definite–indefinite orders in 95% of the cases, but when attempting to recall indefinite–definite orders they alter the definiteness of one or both of the arguments and produce indefinite–definite orders only in 6% of the cases.

There are conflicting reports in the literature concerning whether the Scandinavian languages use prepositional passives as in English. Maling & Zaenen (1985) showed that Icelandic does not have the construction; instead the Icelandic data should be analyzed as topicalization of the complement of a preposition in impersonal passives. They suggested that the same account would be appropriate for Danish and Swedish, whereas Norwegian is reported to have a rather productive prepositional passive (Lødrup 1991). In order to find out to what extent and in what ways prepositional passives are actually used, we carried out a series of investigations in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish contemporary text corpora, analyzing over 3600 potential prepositional passives, with a balance of periphrastic and morphological passive forms. We have found that prepositional passives are indeed used in all three languages, but rather infrequently, ranging from 3.4 per million words (3.4/mw) in Swedish, 5/mw in Danish to 16/mw in Norwegian. The majority of the prepositional passives are periphrastic bli(ve)-passives. The passive subject is typically animate, a person or an animal, who is psychologically affected by the action, or the lack of action, expressed by the participle. The notion of affectedness that is relevant for these languages thus differs from what has been described for English. Prepositional s-passives are found in coordinated structures and in infinitival complements of modal verbs, a context known to favour s-passive.

The Danish prosodic phenomenon stød is associated with a specific range of suffixes including the singular definite suffixes -en and -et. Diachronically, as well as distributionally, stød is related to Swedish/Norwegian accent 1, but unlike accent 1, stød is seen as phonetically and phonologically marked. Keeping in mind the cross-distribution between phonetic/phonological markedness and distributional patterns, we investigate here whether stød is also related to accent 1 when it comes to cognitive markedness. We present the results of a psycholinguistic study in which participants attended to words that were either appropriate combinations of prosody (stød vs. non-stød) and suffix (singular definite -en/-et vs. plural indefinite -e) or mismatches between prosody and suffix. Participants gave slower and more inaccurate responses to mismatches. This effect of mismatch was most pronounced for words with non-stød stems, indicating that the cognitive markedness status of stød corresponds to that of accent 2.

The Danish stød, a kind of glottal prosody associated with certain syllables, as in barʔn ‘child’ (cf. stødless barnlig ‘childish’), has long been the target of intense phonological investigation. In this paper, we show that its analysis requires an understanding of the prosodic constituent structure of Danish, and of the essential role of the perfect prosodic word (coextensive with one foot). After motivating this notion on independent grounds, both in other languages and in the context of acquisition, we show that the Danish stød system, analyzed in Optimality Theory, provides a window on the workings of the perfect prosodic word, regulating the presence and absence of stød in some of the much-discussed cases in the literature. In conclusion, we discuss the status of the perfect prosodic word in the light of recent developments in phonological theory, such as Match Theory.